In dental treatment, when diseases such as caries exist in teeth, they are eliminated and a variety of materials such as metals, dental composite resin, porcelain and the like are used to restore the eliminated parts. Particularly, dental composite resin and porcelain are greatly demanded because they are excellent in esthetic due to exhibition of a dental crown color.
However, these dental restorative and prosthetic materials having high esthetic are hard to be polished. Particularly, dental composite resin is composed of glass filler having high hardness and resin having low hardness. It is very difficult to varnish materials composed of a plurality of materials having different hardness each other at a final polishing stage.
In addition, it is also difficult to varnish by polishing porcelain and teeth due to high hardness.
JP 11-277453A discloses a dental polishing article composed of a buffing material in which cerium grains are fixed to its polishing portion. This means is excellent in fitness, elasticity and flexibility of the polishing portion. However, its application is limited to dental porcelain and it cannot be use for materials to be polished.
In many of current polishing method, polishing is carried out with an elastomer polishing article after adjusting shapes and occlusion with a grinding instrument such as vitrified bonds or electroplated diamond tools.
Since these methods cannot achieve sufficient gloss, varnishing is carried out by using a cup-shape rotary instrument made of rubber and the like or a brush made of nylon with supplying special polishing paste. However, this method of varnishing takes very long time and is ineffective for treatment. A chair time for patients tends to expand.
In addition, by using diamond grains, it is relatively easy to varnish these hard materials to be polished, and diamond-containing elastomer polishing articles are commercially available.
For example, JP 6-22983A discloses a technique to improve polishability by kneading coated diamond grains with elastomer and by molding.
JP 2005-22033A discloses a technique to improve polishability by forming hollows or holes in a polishing portion in order to suppress friction when polishing. However, components used in the polishing portion is usual and when materials having high hardness is polished, it is required to use diamond as grains.
JP 2001-9736A discloses a porous polishing article having moderate flexibility and a hardwearing property in which bubbles are formed in the polishing portion.
However, since these polishing articles contain a lot of diamond, they are very expensive. Thus, polishing articles using reduced amount of diamond have been demanded.
JP 2002-86361A discloses polishing articles made by compounding inorganic fibers in elastomer. Compounding of inorganic fibers improves polishability and reduces the amount of grains to be used. However, when they are used in dental composite resin, it is not so useful because they scratch the resin surface.
[Patent Document 1] JP 11-277453A
[Patent Document 2] JP 6-22983A
[Patent Document 3] JP 2005-22033A
[Patent Document 4] JP 2001-9736A
[Patent Document 5] JP 2002-86361A